Ten Years After: Tegan & Sara revisit breakthrough album with tour, covers album

The story behind Tegan & Sara’s 2007 album, The Con, has been retold in the past few months due to its 10th anniversary and the Calgary-born duo’s decision to mark this milestone with both a semi-acoustic tour and new tribute album featuring a colourful collection of their peers lovingly recreating tracks from the record.

On the one hand, it’s a story of empowerment and musical evolution; of artists finding a new voice and finally outgrowing the novelty of being a youthful, twin-sister folk act.

But on the other, it’s a story about heartache and anxiety and hard-won maturity.

A decade ago, Sara Quin had just bought her first house. The twins were both mourning the loss of their grandmother. There was more than a little romantic messiness in both their lives and they were also fighting with each other. Just for good measure, the Quins also learned that the record company that had housed the act since its early years was going out of business, making Tegan & Sara free agents and opening them to decidedly stressful negotiations that would determine their future.

“I always joke and say ‘death and taxes,’ but that’s what was on my mind,” says Sara Quin, in a phone interview with Postmedia. “I was like ‘Oh my God, being an adult is so stressful.’ All I could think about was losing people. Who else was going to die? There was a real existential crisis happening for me. A lot of that anxiety and pressure — external and internal pressure — came out in that record.”

Which, Quin concedes, wasn’t necessarily all that different from past records, at least on the surface. In 2007, Tegan & Sara had a decade and four albums under their belts, having graduated from Calgary coffee houses into the national spotlight as young teenagers. To some degree, every album had required the Quin sisters to “go into a dark, introspective place,” she says. Tegan & Sara may have sang the Oscar-nominated song Everything is Awesome, but their own Ani DiFranco-esque material early in their career was not known for being particularly sunny.

Still, this felt different.

“We were 26 years old and I think you’re just getting your first taste of how you have to manage that stuff,” Quin says. “You’re not a kid anymore and no one is going to rush in and fix it. I just turned 37 last week and you develop skills and develop strategies of how to cope with all this stuff. But at 26, I was just freaking out.”

All of which may paint The Con, both the finished product and its creation, as a rather grim enterprise. It’s not. Sure, it can be dark. But the 14 songs also marked a turning point for the band, both creatively and personally. The Con showcased a growing confidence as musicians, particularly in the studio. Their sound was never manufactured by outside producers, of course, but on prior albums the duo’s limited expertise in the studio had often required others to make technical decisions on their behalf. While it was produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, The Con also had Tegan & Sara flexing a new-found independence.

“I remember saying to Chris Walla, that I feel like I hate being in the studio and I don’t want to feel like I hate bing in the studio,” Quin says. “I love being at home. I love writing and recording and I want to use my instincts and my style and my technical approach. He was amazing about that. Instead of doing the record in a studio, we did it in his basement.”

They also worked sequentially, starting with the opening track, I Was Married, and ending with the closing ballad, Call it Off. It helped maintain a narrative thread to The Con. At the time, Tegan & Sara even referred to it as a concept album. Whatever the case, the songs’ assured melodies and detailed lyrics about messy relationships showed a deepening talent as songwriters and also helped cement the duo’s growing reputation as a voice for the LGBTQ community. When revisiting the album recently, Pitchfork described I Was Married as “a landmark piece of music about gay rights.”

Even before entering Walla’s basement studio in Portland, Quin said she had felt a shift in their career and fan base. Their previous release, 2004’s So Jealous, had found the sisters’ pushing their sound past the strummy acoustic folk of early albums into a more muscular, pop-punk sound. The album’s single, Walking with a Ghost, was even covered by the White Stripes. For the first time, Tegan & Sara felt as if there was a fan base eagerly waiting for what came next.

“I think The Con was probably our real breakthrough in terms of riding the momentum of our previous albums and some of the successes that had come from that,” Quin says. “It was the first record I felt that people wanted. There was an expectation. Up until that point, it had been more of a battle. Ok, we’ve got an album out, how do we get people to care? How do we get people to listen?’ ”

Over the past 10 years, Tegan & Sara have also discovered that The Con tends to be a favourite among both their fans and fellow musicians. The Quins figured this made it good fodder for a lavish birthday celebration. The Con X Tour, which swings into the Jubilee Auditorium on Monday, has had the Quins revisiting the album in full. To raise money for the Tegan & Sara Foundation, which “fights for health, economic justice and representation for LGBTQ girls and women,” Warner Bros. also released The Con X: Covers, which features a wide variety of acts putting their stamp on The Con’s songs. Tegan & Sara hand-picked the participants, which include Ryan Adams, CHVRCHES, City and Colour, Bleachers and, on the extended version, even Cyndi Lauper.

The process of both deconstructing these 10-year-old songs for the tour and hearing other bands’ wildly different takes on them has made Quin view them in a new light.

“For me, to have artists cover our songs is still sort of an out-of-body experience,” she says. “I feel like anything that has my voice or Tegan’s voice in it immediately goes into some part of my brain that magnifies and scrutinizes and takes the pleasure out of listening to it. It’s like seeing yourself in a photograph or a video. You want to enjoy it but it’s like: ‘Oh God, why am I making that face?’

“To hear the songs through someone else’s voice or perspective allows me to consider what a fan would hear and understand the song a little differently.”

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